The founder of Anduril, Palmer Luckey, after realising that not too many silicon valley tech companies wanted to cooperate with the American Department of Defense decided that he will be the biggest contractor for the US government regarding high-tech software and hardware technology. After selling his company – Oculus – in 2014 for $2 billion he started preparing and by 2017 he started a company Anduril. The company states that it wants to transform the US & allied military capabilities with advanced technology. They got the first funding of $17 million in January 2017 – immediately after starting the company. Later on in the second quarter of 2018 another big investment was made, $41 million, led by Founders Fund – a San Francisco based venture capital firm investing in revolutionary technologies.
The investments made it possible for Anduril to grow in size and develop important products, the first one being an AI-driven sentry tower that is able to detect threat from 2 to 15 kilometers away, that now is used to overlook the USA-Mexico Border. Later on, the company started developing other products like force protection, air systems, underwater vehicles, but most importantly – Lattice OS – an operating system designed for war. It uses deep learning to help make suggestions to support the operators in tough decisions. Another important function of the system is Real-Time Understanding, which uses sensor fusion, computer vision, edge computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect objects and classify them in the operators vicinity. Lastly, it enables real-time command and control. It allows just one operator to quickly control a team of assets.
Summing up – Anduril brings many new capabilities to the defense. It may prove beneficial in situations like the current one in Ukraine. Since the start of war Anduril has been steadily arming the Ukrainian forces with high-tech armament. After just 5 years on the market company managed to be valued at $7 billion dollars. It is one of the fastest growing start-ups in recent years and I think that they are just getting started with improving their products as well as releasing new highly advanced defense systems.
Links:
https://www.generalist.com/briefing/anduril
www.anduril.com
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
https://www.ft.com/content/56d7d1ed-6b84-476a-9342-a47f94ce8f2a
It’s interesting to see where the military is headed and what advancements it has made. However it’s also scary to think that soon we will have robots made with the intention of killing humans.